Gau (country subdivision)

Gau (plural Gaue, Dutch: gouw, Frisian: gea or goa) is a Germanic term for a region within a country, often a former or actual province. It was used in medieval times, when it can be seen as roughly corresponding to an Englishshire. The administrative use of the term was revived as a subdivision during the period of Nazi Germany in 1933–1945. It still appears today in regional names, such as the Ambergau.

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The Germanic word is reflected in Gothic gavi (neuter; genitive gaujis) and early Old High German gewi, gowi (neuter) and in some compound names still -gawi as in Gothic (e.g. Durgawi "Thurgau", Alpagawi "Allgäu"), later gâi, gôi, and after loss of the stem suffix gaw, gao, and with motion to the feminine as gawa[1] besides gowo (from gowio. Old Saxon shows further truncation to gâ, gô.[2] The German word is a gloss of the Latinpagus; hence the Gau is analogous with the pays of feudal France.

Old English, by contrast, has only traces of the word, which was ousted by scire from an early time, in names such as Noxga gā, Ohtga gā and perhaps in gōman, ġēman (yeoman), which would then correspond to the Old High German gaumann (Grimm) although the OED prefers connection of yeoman to young.

In the Frankish Empire, a Gau was a subdivision of the realm, further divided into Hundreds. The Frankish gowe thus appears to correspond roughly to the civitas in other Barbarian kingdoms (Visigoths, Burgundians, Lombards). After the end of the Migration period, the Hundred (centena or hunaria, Old High German huntari) became a term for an administrative unit or jurisdiction, independent of the figure hundred. The Frankish usage contrasts with Tacitus' Germania, where a pagus was a subdivision of a tribal territory or civitas, corresponding to the Hundred, i.e. areas liable to provide a hundred men under arms, or containing roughly a hundred homesteads each, further divided into vici (villages or farmsteads).[3]

In the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine, the Gau formed the unit of administration of the Carolingian empire during the 9th and 10th centuries. Similar to many shires in England, during the Middle Ages, many such gaus came to be known as counties or Grafschaften, the territory of a Graf or count within the Holy Roman Empire. Such a count or graf would originally have been an appointed governor, but the position generally became an hereditary vassal princedom, or fief in most of continental Europe.

The term Gau was revived in the 1920s as the name given to the administrative regions of the NSDAP (Nazy Party). The Gau was the main administrative region of the party, created by a party statute dated May 22, 1926. Each Gau was headed by a Gauleiter. The original 32 Gaue were generally coterminous with the Länder (states) of the Weimer Republic and the Prussian provinces.

By 1938, all of Germany was divided into around thirty Gaue. Following the suppression of the political institutions of the Länder in 1934, the Gaue became the de facto administrative regions of the government, and each individual Gauleiter had considerable power within his territory.

German-speaking territories annexed to Germany from 1938 were generally organised into Reichsgaue. Unlike the pre-existing Gaue, the new Reichsgaue formally combined the spheres of both party and state administration.

Following the annexation of Austria in 1938, the country, briefly renamed "Ostmark", was sub-divided into seven Reichsgaue. These had boundaries broadly the same as the former Austrian Länder (states), with the Tyrol and Vorarlberg being merged as "Tyrol-Vorarlberg", Burgenland being divided between Styria and "Lower Danube" (the renamed Lower Austria). Upper Austria was also renamed "Upper Danube", thus eliminating the name of "Austria" (Österreich in German) from the official map. A small number of boundary changes were also made, the most significant of which was the massive expansion of Vienna's official territory, at the expense of "Lower Danube".

Northern and eastern territory annexed from the dismembered Czechoslovakia were mainly organised as the Reichsgau of Sudetenland, with territory to the south annexed to the Reichsgaue of Lower and Upper Danube.

The medieval term Gau (sometimes Gäu; gouw in Dutch) has survived as (second, more generic) component of the names of certain regions – some named after a river – in Germany, Austria, Alsace, Switzerland, Belgium, South Tyrol, and the Netherlands.